The Power of a Vision

I believe that a vision has a strong power to our actions. Vision helps survive, vision helps endure hardships, it moves a person or events when something seems unrealistic ally hard to carry out or achieve. It empowers… I believe that without a vision a person has no direction. It’s a blueprint, which a person has in his or her mind and steadily follows it. It helps a person to be more confident and firm in his or her actions. People, who achieved big thing in their lives, had strong visions. The stronger the vision, the higher can be the achievement of the goal.

I have some visions about my professional and private life. Maybe they are not too high, but I try to be realistic. I am going to share two of my visions. My vision for my professional life is to graduate and get a good job in a financial company or a bank. I am a positive thinker, so I believe that the economic situation will improve soon, and I will be able to get a well-paid and satisfying job, which will allow me to grow. For this, I have to study well and to try to get good knowledge and skills as well as good GPA. So, I am on the road to it.
I have another vision, and it is a humanitarian one. I believe that people should not only look for their own benefits, but also think about giving to those who are in need and bring a drop of happiness in the world. To me, the most vulnerable people are children, the sick, and elderly people. I have a vision to do something for children, who have no parents. I think of starting with sponsoring a small orphanage or at least some programs, in a poor country, and if I will be able to raise money, maybe I will be able to sponsor a bigger orphanage. I had a small experience in doing it, and it felt great when I saw that I could make a difference in someone’s lives at least for some moments. To achieve this, I’d need to 1) decide what orphanage to sponsor, 2) contact people in charge of the place, 3) put aside the sum of money I’d like to contribute, 4) involve my friends in the project to raise more money or to participate in some other ways, 5) find out about the biggest needs and bring the project, which would help to satisfy at least some of those needs. I’d like to start with small realistic contribution and try to grow.

These are two of some of my visions. I believe that everything is possible if one has a vision, which is good, big, and if the person takes actions.

Decision Making

Decision making can be a hard task, whether it is made by an individual or by a group of people, especially if the group is large like our class. People approach and act differently to making a decision. Decision making can be frustrating, it can lead people to withdraw or disengage, it can prone to self-serving behavior, it can be challenging under time constraints and uncertainty, it can require people to think deeply about problems, it can require an interplay between leader and group.

In our case, I think that all these components of decision making were involved. Because our group is large, there were very many different opinions. I believe that those students who did the best on some sections, wanted to retain those kinds of assignments and to eliminate the assignments that were the most challenging for them, whereas other students wanted to keep those “challenging” assignments because they were good at doing them. Some students were more active than the other, and some simply withdrew. I didn’t actively participate because there were too many voices and I didn’t want to add up one more voice to already very active discussion. Besides, I agreed with some thoughts that were already expressed.

I liked the fact that many students remembered ethical norms in offering changes and didn’t want to take an advantage of the offered right to make changes to the next tests. I think that the most challenging task in our decision making was to handle a big number of various and sometimes even controversial proposals of the huge group and to come to some mutual decision. The student who facilitated the process did very well, to my mind. As another way to handle asimilar discussion, I would suggest to break the group in smaller groups and to ask each group to come up with a number of suggestions. Then, to accept the most popular and reasonable suggestions. This would allow more people to participate and have their voices heard. I believe that it would also make the process smoother.

Egg-Cellent Management

How to through an egg from an arm's distance and not to crack it? Our group didn't manage this assignment... and the egg cracked! To analyze what went wrong, we received another assignment to identify each steps and how we did it.

Step 1. Define your goals and objectives. Our group was not bad at this. We understood our task - the egg shouldn't get cracked. We spoke about various ways of protecting it from the impact and cracking. Our group, though, had a few opinions and by the end when we were pressed by time, we didn't choose the best set of offered actions. In this case, I think, we needed to have one leader, who would be responsible for the project.

Step 2. Determine your resources and current status vis-à-vis objectives. Our group understood very well that we had limited resources at our hands to cope with the assignment. It was a little stressful to understand the limitation of time and resources, and we valued any opinion. We also tried to plan how we could efficiently use our resources.

Step 3. Develop several alternative strategies. We discussed what might happen and tried to improve every idea.

Step 4. Make a tactical plan. The roles were allocated to every member of the team and everyone was very helpful and tried to do his/her best.

Step 5. Implement the plan and evaluate the results. I believe, this was our weakest part. Because we had very little time left, we started panicking and actually didn’t have time to complete what we wanted to do.

Even though we didn’t do the assignment successfully, I believe, we had a good experience of working as a team and listen to and value different opinions, to respect other member’s opinion, and think critically.